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Off the Cuff Decision Sparked Boreham Series

Dan Graves, MSL

When two such notable evangelistic workers as Billy Graham and Ravi
Zecharias commend the writings of a man, he must have had things to say
that were truly worthwhile. That man was F. W. Boreham, a Baptist pastor
who once held the record as Australia's most prolific author. Many of
Boreham's essays take small things as their starting point to display
the goodness of God.

Boreham was born in England in 1871, on the day that the
Franco-Prussian war ended. His Christian family reared him in the
knowledge of God and he was blessed to sit under many of the notable
evangelistic preachers of his day, among whom were Charles Haddon
Spurgeon, A. T. Pierson, and Dwight L. Moody. He learned the art of
speaking well.

As a young minister-in-training, Boreham was sent to fill a pulpit in
the village of Theydon Bois. There he met Stella. Finding that she was
without an escort to the village one day, he asked permission to
accompany her. Her hat blew off several times in the heavy wind and he
suggested he tie it on her with his handkerchief. She agreed. "We saved
the hat, but we lost our hearts," he wrote in his autobiography. Stella
became his wife after he wrote to her from a pastorate he had accepted
in New Zealand.

After many years in Mosgiel, New Zealand, Boreham transferred to a
church in Tasmania. He began to publish his sermons as essays: The
Luggage of Life, Mountains in the Mist, and about ninety other
titles. These books brought him an international reputation. On this day, March 28, 1911, while pastoring in
Tasmania, he began preaching a series of sermons that won more souls to
Christ than any of his other themes.

The idea was completely spontaneous. He was beginning another Sunday
evening series to run on alternate weeks. He saw that he needed
something to draw the people in the intervals. He had read a biography
of Luther that week and was impressed that the Reformation sprang from a
single text taken from the Bible book of Romans.

As the final hymn came to a close on the morning of March 21, 1911,
Boreham rose and surprised himself by saying that the next week he would
commence a second series titled Texts that Made History. "
'Next Sunday evening,' I added with the air of a man who had laid his
plans weeks beforehand, 'I shall deal with Martin Luther's Text!'"

Boreham was as good as his word, searching out the scripture texts
that had inspired the lives of great men such as Luther, Cromwell,
Hannington and over 120 others (not to mention fictional characters such
as Robinson Crusoe). This wonderful series was printed under various
titles but Kregel has now gathered them into several volumes under the
title Life Verses.

Boreham, who had lost his right foot under a train, often fell and
broke bones. To read his cheery books, you'd never realize how much pain
he endured. In addition to his religious work, he wrote regularly for
two secular papers, The Hobart Mercury and The Melbourne
Age.

Bibliography:

Boreham, F. W. A Pathway of Roses; an autobiography.
1940.

---------------- Mountains in the Mist; Luggage of Life; The
Golden Milestone; Cliffs of Opal; The Whisper of God; Dreams at Sunset;
Life Verses; A Late Lark Singing; etc.